What does the FSF censor during the Richard Stallman lynching?
The fact is, before 1983 #FreeSoftware was NOT a movement.
It was just the usual way to distribute code that was instrumental to turn very expensive machines from weird furnitures to useful computers.
Back then software was #free as in beer because the actual product was the hardware.
#RMS realized that software is #knowledge and it must be kept free.
RMS claimed personal credit for a movement which existed before him and will exist after him. RMS has been the Microsoft of free software, with his own adopt, revise, extend, and proprietize strategy.
Free software before early RMS/GNU or simultaneous but RMS had nothing to do with it:
CTSS 1961
MULTICS 1965
ALOHANET 1971
ftp 1972
cron 1975
BSD 1975
CBBS 1978
SIMTEL-20 1979
USENET 1980
Email RFC 821/822 1982
Sockets BSD 4.2 1983
telnet RFC 854 1983
Fidonet 1984
ka9q 1985
Minix 1987
That was not a movement.
That's mainly academy.
Surely, there were #hackers before #RMS. And surely there will be hackers after him.
That's quite obvious, and adds nothing to the discussion.
But before GNU GPL, #FreeSoftware was not a movement with an ethics and an identity.
Usually I argue that #RMS focused #FreeSoftware on the wrong core value: among hackers, #freedom is ancillary to #curiosity, which is the core value of our ethics.
But arguing that RMS was irrelevant to Free Software growth and successes is ridiculous.
Also, focusing on the content of the censored mail is totally missing the point.
The mail was NOT in conflict with #GNU Kind Communications Guidelines or any other Code of Conduct.
Thus it was #censored for its content. From the #FSF.
#Free Software Foundation.
Censoring mails to frame the narrative of the whole movement.
I don't really care about self-promoters who proprietize and seek to control and claim credit for work done by others.
RMS was EMACS maintainer for 32 years until 11 years ago. Okay great. That puts him in line with thousands of other people.
We should be primarily praising folks like Lick, Corbato, Kernighan, Ritchie, Joy, Roberts, Khan, Postel, Davies, Kleinrock, Landweber. Not just RMS. Particularly not where "ethics" are concerned.
https://scanlyze.org/2013/03/28/the-people-who-built-the-internet/
You look confused.
Are you stating that we should count people contributions by lines of code?
Actually that's a very #OpenSource / #US #corporate thing to do: developers are just well educated slaves that should do what managers cannot do by themselves (without ever wondering WHY managers cannot manage to learn programming by themselves, actually).
If so, why was #RMS lynched for what he WROTE?
OTOT, if the #Politics and #Ethics of #FreeSoftware have are relevant, like it or not, #Stallman has been fundamental to DEFINE Free Software in the last 40 years.
Don't talk about what has happened to RMS as a "lynching."
Nobody tortured RMS to death and hung him from a tree because of his race. That's a very over the top and inappropriate metaphor.
There's two kinds of people in the world, workers, who do the work, and capitalists and managers who try to gain control of the workers output and control, restrict, and profit from it, while returning to the workers only a fraction of the value of the work. In the case of GNU and RMS, nothing.
"Witches" were not lynched for their race, @hhardy01
As I said before, the main issue with #RMS is that he doesn't belong to any of the minorities that fill the remorse of #US people.
He isn't a person of colour...
He isn't a woman...
He isn't gay... and so on.
Lynching is an act done by a mob that is independent by the reasons they use to justify themselves.
And obviously we are not talking about a physical lynching.
Yet it WAS lynching.
And it WAS for what he wrote.
A plain violation of his human rights (apparently supported by #FSF) by a crowd of cowards that will never admit to themselves that they have been manipulated by the channels they use to communicate.
For more on this, please refer to https://qoto.org/web/statuses/102974129783762338
Somebody needs to ask RMS directly if he received any money or favors from Epstein. Since Minsky was his patron at CSAIL and Minsky was implicated in his alleged relationship with Epstein and his underage sex slave and spurious defenses for Minsky's supposed conduct was what got RMS in trouble.
Minsky was someone I admired and had two conversations with. I gave him a copy of Propp: Morphology of the Folktale.
I'm not going around trying to excuse his alleged conduct like RMS was/is.
If you think this is a good question to ask, send it to rms@gnu.org
But again, we are mixing different issues.
Even if RMS was the worst sex criminal in the world, people around him covered him for years enabling his crimes against several victims.
And these people are now censoring people who defend him?
Don't be naive: this is all a power game internal to #FSF and those who controlled the lynching crowd are now going to control FSF.
You'll see that FSF people will start to talk of #FLOSS, than #FOSS then finally just #OSS.
All will be clean and nice and #business friendly.
Including #GPL v4.
Have you ever been to the FSF? Have you ever met in person any of the people you are talking about with such confidence?
Also, "lynching" does not mean what you seem to think it does.
What I have not heard from you is anything about Virginia Giuffre and the other girls whom Epstein raped and enslaved. I have not heard anything about Minsky, about RMS comments about Minsky.
I do not care about your whataboutism or your unfounded fantasies about the FSF, who runs it, and what goes on.
@Shamar
RMS was not the "founder of the free software movement."
RMS started gnu in 1983 with the aim of creating a unix-like system. Still waiting on that HURD kernel, there. How's that going?
BSD was a complete work-alike version of system 7 unix. Ken Thompson, Bill Joy, Chuck Haley and others started work on a system 6/7 workalike which was released as 1BSD in 1975. 2BSD was released 1979, including vi and csh.
Look at the RFC's before 1983. Most implementations are free software.